Murgatroyd disappointedly hopped to the floor. He watched with bright eyes as Calhoun annoyedly went to the emergency-equipment locker and brought out the apparatus designed to take care of a state of things like this. If the situation wasn't too bad, correcting it should be simple enough. If it was too bad, it could be fatal. The average separation of stars throughout the galaxy, of course, is something like four or five light-years. The distance between sol-type stars is on an average very much higher, and with certain specific exceptions habitable planets are satellites of sol-type suns. But only a fraction of the habitable planets are colonized, and when a ship has traveled blind, in overdrive, for two months or more its pilot cannot simply look astern and recognize his point of departure. There's too much scenery in between. Further, nobody can locate himself by the use of star-maps unless he knows where something on the star-map is, with reference to himself. Which makes a star-map not always useful. But the present blunder might not be serious. If the Med Ship had come out into normal space no more than eight to ten light-years from Merida, Calhoun might identify that sun by producing parallax. He could detect relative distances for a much greater range. But it was to be hoped that his present blunder was small. He got out the camera with its six lenses for the six vision-screens which showed space in all directions. He clamped it in place and painstakingly snapped a plate. In seconds he had everything above third magnitude faithfully recorded in its own color, and with relative brightnesses expressed in the size of the dots of tint. He put the plate aside and said: "Overdrive coming, Murgatroyd." He pressed the short-hop button and there was dizziness and nausea and a flash of fear--all three sensations momentary. Murgatroyd said, "_Chee_" in a protesting tone, but Calhoun held down the button for an accurate five minutes. He and Murgatroyd gulped together when he let up the button again and all space whirled and nausea hit as before. He took another plate of all the heavens, made into one by the six-lensed camera. He swung the ship by ninety degrees and pressed the short-hop button a second time. More dizziness and panic and digestive revolt. In five minutes it was repeated as the ship came out to normal space yet again. "_Chee-chee!_" protested Murgatroyd. His furry paws held his round little belly against further insult. "I agree," said Calhoun. "I don't like it either. But I want to know where we are--if anywhere."